Many character oriented applications were written with the linux
console as the platform in mind, and although most of them do
well when run in xterm emulation (which is konsole's default),
they don't look as pleasant as the original.

Konsole has lately improved it's support for the linux console.

Simple choose "Linux console" from the "New" menu (or click the
right mouse button while holding down the control key).

To get proper support of graphic characters, you need a linux console
font being installed. Proceed as follows:

|
|     cp konsole/other/linux*.pcf.gz /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc
|     mkfontdir /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc
|     xset fp rehash
|

Depending on the application, you might need to switch to dark
background, for the best results. (Konsole does this automatically
for you when you select the linux console as suggested above).

Please note that those applications may not react properly on
changing the window size. Often they ignore it completely or
behave strange in other ways. I even saw one application dying
from the shock of noticing that the linux console has simply
changed it's size (Debian's dselect). Since the Linux console
can be resized, this behavior is to be considered a bug of
these applications, i cannot help it.

Mouse-aware application will most probably not recognize
mouse events (especially mc) since they might try to get
these events from gpm instead from the console.

The linux console can some funny quirks with special graphic
characters and i haven't yet managed to teach Konsole all of
them. In rare cases, they might display differently. Affected
to my knowlegde are especially non-VT100 extentions taken from
the AT&T 4410v1, these are arrow symbols, a full block and a
checker board. Most other tricks that the linux console is
able to do with character sets are eventually not even used
in a single instance, so you will hardly be disturbed by 
konsoles inability to do them.


Anyway, try

  cd /usr/src/linux
  make menuconfig

for a pleasing view.


I found lately, that konsole does pretty well when running
dosemu, too: Fire up the linux console emulation as above,
set the size to 80x25 (ibmpc) and start "dos".